Bug #16820: LEGAL is out of sync

• Status: Closed
• Assignee: -
• Target version: -
• Backport: 2.5: UNKNOWN, 2.6: UNKNOWN, 2.7: UNKNOWN

[shyouhei (Shyouhei Urabe)]

At the very beginning of LEGAL, it reads:

All the files in this distribution are covered under either the Ruby's
license (see the file COPYING) or public-domain except some files
mentioned below.

This means that the exception list must be comprehensive. If we miss someone else's software there, it would be automatically made belong to matz. This is very bad.

However this is happening now.

Unclear situation for benchmark

For instance, benchmark/so_concatenate.rb comes with no license agreements. Yet as we read its contents, there is almost no doubt that it is not covered by the Ruby's license.

The problem is that the URL that was once written inside the file is lost. Our git log tells nothing. This and other files under the directory have permanently lost their origin.

BSD licensed libraries

Take a look at this search result:

% git grep -i 'BSD-2-Clause' | wc -l
43

None of them are listed in LEGAL.

Programs owned by IBM

% git grep 'International Business Machines' | wc -l
4

The four occurrences of the name IBM does not include LEGAL. Also, I wonder if they are actually compatible with Ruby's license.

LGPL portions

% git grep 'the GNU LGPL' | wc -l
11

It seems racc is complicated.

• racc.gemspec says s.licenses = ["MIT"].
• It however has some files that are LGPL.
• It also has some files that are under Ruby's license.

Which one should we believe? If we mix all of them, the library as a whole must be under LGPL. Am I right?

[shyouhei (Shyouhei Urabe)]

• Related to Misc #12529: LEGAL file covering all the license information within Ruby added

[shyouhei (Shyouhei Urabe)]

• Related to Bug #12762: missing links in LEGAL added

[shyouhei (Shyouhei Urabe)]

• Related to Bug #12598: List files with Unicode license in LEGAL file added

[shyouhei (Shyouhei Urabe)]

• Related to Feature #12550: List files with SIL license in LEGAL file added

[shyouhei (Shyouhei Urabe)]

• Related to Bug #12549: List files with CC0 license in LEGAL file added

[hsbt (Hiroshi SHIBATA)]

Should we update the sentence about dual license with BSD-2-Clause to LEGAL file? I'm not sure what your expectation.

[shyouhei (Shyouhei Urabe)]

• Description updated (diff)

[shyouhei (Shyouhei Urabe)]

@hsbt (Hiroshi SHIBATA) Did you want to change license of those libraries from Ruby's to "BSD only"? Then we should list up all of them in LEGAL. If you didn't intend to change their license (== they are still dual-licensed), then their gemspec shall be updated to reflect that info like s.licenses = ["Ruby", "BSD-2-Clause"]. Note that "Ruby" is a valid SPDX ID that you can write there.

[hsbt (Hiroshi SHIBATA)]

I see.

If you didn't intend to change their license (== they are still dual-licensed), then their gemspec shall be updated to reflect that info like s.licenses = ["Ruby", "BSD-2-Clause"].

We should update it to gemspec files especially the default gems.

[shyouhei (Shyouhei Urabe)]

OK, thank you for clarification. Then we don't have to bother them in LEGAL.

[hsbt (Hiroshi SHIBATA)]

I fixed the licenses field in the default gems at https://github.com/ruby/ruby/commit/8fb02b7a97

[shyouhei (Shyouhei Urabe)]

Great! I have also updated LEGAL in https://github.com/ruby/ruby/pull/3082

The situation is much better than before now. Thank you.

[sawa (Tsuyoshi Sawada)]

• Description updated (diff)

[hsbt (Hiroshi SHIBATA)]

racc.gemspec says s.licenses = ["MIT"].

It's my mistake. It should be use "Ruby" license. I fixed at https://github.com/ruby/racc/commit/f600effadaec9e389fc336309021640c565c7232.

It however has some files that are LGPL.
It also has some files that are under Ruby's license.

racc uses Ruby license now. If some files show LGPL, We should update it to Ruby's license.

[jeremyevans0 (Jeremy Evans)]

• Status changed from Open to Closed

Ruby does not seem to have any LGPL code anymore. The IBM code is now documented in LEGAL. The BSD-2-Clause code is still not documented in LEGAL, but all BSD-2-Clause code seems to also be licensed under Ruby license, so I don't think it is necessary to document in LEGAL. The benchmark code issues are also now documented in LEGAL. Since all issues have addressed, I think this can be closed.